SAN FRANCISCO---If you were hoping for a shiny new Apple TV or wearable, you'll be sorely disappointed by Monday's WWDC announcements. But for those interested in advancements for both Apple's mobile and desktop operating systems, iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite spell big news for both developers and consumers alike.
The biggest news for Yosemite is its redesign, which more closely unifies the desktop operating system with iOS. Broader iCloud-based syncing across Apple's operating systems virtually erases the borders between devices. But updates to iOS, and the developer side of iOS, were the key focus of today's presentation. With a slew of new APIs, an entirely new language for developers, and a handful of "kits" (HealthKit and HomeKit) for them to tie into, iOS 8 marks a huge step for iOS.
Tim Cook kicked off Apple's 2014 WWDC keynote, now in its 25th year, by talking about the future of iOS and Mac OS X. Today, we’re going to see the future of iOS and Mac OS X, he said, and how they work seamlessly together.
That point was driven home first by Craig Federighi, who introduced the latest version of Mac OS X: Yosemite. The new desktop operating system will have a new interface that borrows heavily from Apple's latest mobile OS. There are also enhancements to popular apps, as well as a new feature called continuity that lets you hand off and pick up tasks you start on one Apple device with another. (See our TL;DR version of today's announcements here.)
OS X Yosemite
The look of Yosemite, from the toolbars to window construction, has been adjusted. Windows and the dock are now translucent. So is FaceTime, Contacts, and Reminders, making them less intrusive on your desktop experience. App icons have also been redesigned with updated typography that looks more modern and iOS-like. There is also a new dark mode for windows and the dock.
Notification Center has that dark translucent background, and now the "Today" view can be expanded with widget information from your favorite apps. It's very Google Now-like, providing you with an assortment of useful information at a glance, on the righthand side of the screen.
With Yosemite, Apple continues to absorb popular third-party app functionality too---namely, that of Dropbox and Alfred. With Spotlight, you can now tap the magnifying glass to pull up a larger search bar in the center of the screen. From there you can search and open apps, pull up reminders and calendar events, or search information on Wikipedia or the web. Maps is also accessible from Spotlight---you can search for sushi, get map information, results from Yelp, and more. If you search for a movie, it gives you movie location and ticket information when applicable, as well as information about availability in the iTunes Store.
ICloud Drive will be new addition to iCloud. It's essentially a new file storage system that syncs your files automatically across all of your Macs and iOS devices (and Windows, too!). It's a lot like Dropbox, with files organized in folders inside.
Next, Mail Drop, lets you send attachments, up to 5 GB in size, encrypted. And with a new Markup feature, you can edit files you write in your email and send them back on their way---super handy if you need to sign a PDF form and send it to a contact.
The Safari navigation bar has also been redesigned. The search field (integrated into the URL field now) offers a drop down menu for your most-viewed sites. There is also a tab view, which offers an at-a-glance view of each tab (stacked according to site). You can also now have a single private tab when you have more discreet browsing needs. Safari has also been updated so that now you get 2 hours better battery life streaming 1080p video on Netflix on a MacBook Air than before. Its Javascript compiler has also been improved so its 6.5 times faster.
When you're using Safari, if you type in something and hit return, you're taken to Google results. Or, you you can pull up one of a set of pre-populated results in a drop down menu, including Wikipedia results for whatever you're searching for. To share an article, you can use a new "recent recipients" feature to share an image you found on a website. When you use markup on a photo in an email, it can recognize that you're drawing an arrow at an object, or a speech bubble, and it replaces your drawn symbols with more professional looking ones.
Federighi also introduced Continuity, which basically makes Airdrop work between iOS and the Mac. Now, if you're working on something on a Mac, you can pick up right where you left off on your iPad, or vice versa. This is called "Handoff." It works even if you're composing an email. This, we're super excited about.
Messages has also been updated, and with Voice calls you can now receive calls directly on your Mac, using it as a speakerphone. It works if your phone is all the way across the house on a charger. You can also dial from your Mac. If you see a number on a webpage, you can call it, right from your desktop.
OS X Yosemite is available as a developer preview today. Everyone else can get it in the fall as a free download.
iOS 8
On the iOS front, over 130 million people bought their first Apple iOS device last year, according to Tim Cook, who went on to describe iOS 8 as "a giant release." Craig Federighi came back onstage to elaborate. Starting with iPhone, notification center has been refined with interactive notifications. If you get a message, you can now pull down to reply to the text, without leaving whatever app you're in. Same with a calendar event---even on the lock screen, you can swipe to respond. Double tapping the home screen now gives you access not just to recent apps, but recent contacts too. With these actionable notifications, you can also like a photo on Facebook right from your homescreen.
On the iPad, Safari gets the new tab view features as well. On Mail, you can delete or flag an email with a simple swipe. You can also swipe downwards on a message to minimize an email and get access to other messages.
Mail can also give you suggestions to add events to your calendar. You can swipe down to minimize a message, copy something if you need to, then tap at the bottom to bring that message back to the forefront of your mail experience.
Spotlight on iOS now lets you search for apps you own, as well as ones you don't (on the App Store). You can search for news, songs, restaurants, and movies, getting results for nearby theaters and streaming content. And when you search in Safari, you get Google suggestions as well as those same at-a-glance Spotlight suggestions.
Heavy typers will also enjoy iOS 8. A new keyboard feature called Quicktype, which supports predictive typing selections, lets you type "faster than ever before." If someone asks you, "Do you want to go for dinner or a movie?" Your reply gives you options to select automatically, including "dinner" and "a movie," so you can reply in a snap. This is great---Android and Windows Phone have been far more advanced in this respect than iOS. Apple also says that your typing is kept private---none of your keystrokes leave the device.
Messages, the most frequently used app in iOS, is getting some updates too---specifically with threads and the efficiency of sending messages. You can now name threads, and add or remove people from a conversation. If you're taking part in an annoying thread that's messaging you all the time, you can choose to "Do Not Disturb" it, or leave the thread, so you aren't bombarded with constant notifications.
You can also get an at-a-glance view of attachments from a thread, and share your location easily. This is available under a "Details" button in the upper righthand corner of the message view. By tapping the mic icon next to the message compose field you can also tap to talk more easily and even record what you want to say as an audio message, or easily send video messages. For the messages you receive, you can choose to keep them, or they'll "autodestruct" after a certain amount of time, so that they aren't taking up needed space on your device. And you can listen and reply to audio messages from the lock screen just by raising your iPhone to your ear---and reply to it the same way. Lower the phone, and that message you just recorded gets sent.
Siri has not been forgotten. Now, she can recognize music with Shazam, and supports 20 more languages, among other improvements.
Health is one of the key things we've been waiting to hear from Apple on in today's keynote. As expected, Federighi introduced HealthKit, a single space where developers can contribute to your health profile. It comes with an associated app, Health. Apple is working with Nike and the Mayo Clinic on HealthKit integration. With the Mayo Clinic, patients can be in contact with their healthcare providers, so they can monitor their patients vitals. Your privacy is protected, so you can control which apps can access your health information. Overall, it sounds far less robust than a lot of the Healthbook rumors we've been hearing indicated.
For the new Photos app, every photo you take is now synced with iCloud so it's available on all of your devices. Apple also bolstered search, so you can search for photos based on location, time, and album name. Editing controls have also been improved, and edits are persistent across all of your devices. The Mac will also have a new photo solution for viewing photos, letting you view photos by collection, scrub through them, or browse through them, in a new, iOS-reminiscent interface. When you select a photo, you can make lighting adjustments that show you in real time how different aspects of the photo (like saturation and contrast) are being affected.
Unfortunately, storing those photos in the cloud isn't going to be free, unless you're using 5 GB or less. Apple has updated its pricing scheme. For 20 GB or less, it costs $1 a month.
On the App Store front, Apple is adding an Explore tab letting you search for trending topics and apps by genre. Related searches will appear right below the search bar and offer you options for similar search terms. Developers can also sell their apps in app bundles now, so users can buy multiple apps at a discounted price with just one tap. You can also get app previews (something Windows Phone has already offered). But while Windows lets you preview a limited version of the app, Apple just gives you a video preview of it. Apple is also offering a beta test service called Testflight.
The developer SDK was another big part of today's news. Apple has added 4,000 new developer APIs. One is Extensibility. Apps from the app store can now extend system wide, and add services to other apps. Extensions live inside an app's isolated sandbox. A sandbox is how Apple keeps iOS safe. But now, an app like Bing can offer translations inside of Safari. Photo filters are now supported inside of photos, and third parties can support different document providers. Third party apps can also create widgets which are supported in Notification Center. This is huge.
In a demo, Federighi showed how eBay has an interactive widget in Notification Center. Inside Notification Center, you can tap it and submit a leading bid without needing to visit the app itself. On Safari, you can bring up the action sheet, select Bing Translate, and translate a page in a foreign language to English. Pinterst also has an extension here, so you can easily pin an item to a Pinterest board. TouchID is now available to third party apps, which should make logging into apps much more streamlined. Extensions are really going to streamline the flow of iOS.
You can also now install systemwide third-party keyboards---one of the huge advantages Android users have held over iOS users. Apple used Swype, a popular Android keyboard as an example, so it's likely will be seeing this available on iOS soon.
Along with Healthkit, Apple introduced HomeKit. It uses a common network protocol so only your iPhone can control things like your garage door, the lights, or the thermostat in your home. It's bringing "rationality" to the home automation space, according to Federighi.
CloudKit is another new features for developers, a new iCloud developer framework. It's "effectively free," and scales data allocated to the app based on the number of users, granting you a petabyte of data, and a whole lot of bandwidth for free.
Developers were also introduced to Metal, another new feature for those working on computation and graphics intensive gaming apps. According to Apple, it'll give developers greater direct access to the CPU and GPU, so they can do things like depth of field effects, and other formerly console-only effects, onto a mobile device. Metal provides a 10-fold increase in rendering efficiency for apps. A demo showed the type of effects Epic Games was able to produce in a "zen garden" app. Using your finger, you can manipulate the wind, and watch its effect on 5,000 cherry blossom pedals floating from a tree to the ground. In another scene, 3,500 individually animated butterflies filled the screen. This Zen Garden app will be free in the App Store when iOS 8 becomes available this fall.
But perhaps the biggest news of the day related to X-Code, Apple's development platform. Developers have always had to code in Objective C, but not anymore. Apple unveiled an entirely new programming language called Swift. It's fast, modern, and designed for safety, according to Federighi. For a complex object sort task, Objective C is 2.8x faster than Python, and Swift is faster than that. It includes things like generics, closures, namespaces, and multiple return types---things most of us may not care about too much, but that developers in the audience are going gaga over. Swift reduces 4 to 5 lines of code to one. It's completely native to Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, and has the same runtime as Objective C. So in the same app, you can use Objective C, C, and Swift, interchangeably. It also offers more dynamism for development.
Essentially, Swift makes it really easy to try out new things, and see the results very quickly. Swift will come with complete X-code support, and reference documentations in iBooks.
As of today, iOS 8 beta will be available to developers. The rest of us will get it this fall. And with that, Apple closed today's WWDC keynote presentation.
